I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Japan Would Be Crazy Not To Refocus On Nuclear

Since last year’s earthquake and tsunami most of Japan’s nuclear power plants have either been shutdown or run at reduced capacity. As a result, Japan has turned to massive imports of natural gas and has even been burning oil to generate electricity. But neither of these options are economically sustainable in the long-term.

The problem is that Japan has no significant energy resources. Except for a little coal, they have almost no fossil fuel, poor wind and solar potential, and little biomass potential. This is why they were ramping up nuclear in the first place. The tsunami did not change this. Japan must refocus on nuclear.

Consider the options of how Japan can meet its energy demands in the next two decades. There are two short-term choices: 1) decommission all nuclear plants and replace them with new fossil fuel plants, or 2) restart the nuclear fleet and upgrade their capacity to replace the lost capacity of the Fukushima plants. There are some variations on these two, e.g., shut down only the oldest plants (twelve pre-date 1980), build a few new gas plants, or adjust the particular mix of coal versus gas, but the economic and environmental costs of these two paths are vastly different.

Japan's Hamaoka, Unit 5, an Advanced Boiling Water Reactor, built in 2005, has no need to be shut down prematurely. Units 1 and 2, old reactors from the 1970s, were shut down in 2009, as planned. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ramping up natural gas is not as easy as it may seem. It is cheap to build gas plants but expensive to fuel them. Japan imports liquid natural gas (LNG) at five times the price of natural gas in the U.S. (LNG Commodities). As Christopher Joyce from NPR recently reported, the fuel costs of replacing their nuclear fleet with natural gas would be “staggering…requiring almost 20 percent of the world’s supply of LNG” (Nuclear Woes Push Japan Into A New Energy Future). Japan’s increased use of LNG has already pushed global market prices up to near-record highs and will likely break records this year (LNG Commodities).

So gearing up fossil fuel plants in Japan will most likely be a combination of natural gas and coal, while maintaining their existing oil-fired power plants. Oil was to be phased out, along with much of their coal, as part of their low-carbon plan, but that plan is now on hold indefinitely, and their carbon emissions are rising fast.

Economically, the U.S. would benefit from Japan replacing its nuclear fleet with fossil plants. Abundant U.S. coal and gas can be exported to Japan at a nice profit. But the environmental hypocrisy of that future is not lost on the global community (See: Coal’s Not Dying – it’s just getting shipped abroad).

Materials and fuel are more costly in Japan relative to the U.S., and labor is slightly cheaper. So in $US, replacing Japan’s approximate 300 billion kWhrs/yr of nuclear with a mix of a third coal (twenty-one 750 MW plants with a capcity factor of 71% @ $2.5 billion each) and two-thirds gas (thirty-three 880 MW plants with a capacity factor of 80% @ $820 million each) will cost about $80 billion in construction. But the additional fuel costs for these plants will be about $4 billion/yr @ 4¢/kWhr for coal and $40 billion/yr @ 18¢/kWhr for gas, or about $44 billion/yr. Operating costs for these new plants would total about $15 billion/yr @ 0.5¢/kWhr for each fuel type. So over the next two decades, the cost of replacing nuclear with fossil fuel generation will be about $1.2 trillion, most of it in the cost of natural gas. This cost does not include financing, insurance or other non-operating or non-construction costs. It will take about ten years to fully implement this new mix.

On the other hand, the cost of restarting for the existing nuclear fleet, minus the Fukushima reactors, is $1.8 billion/yr in fuel @ 0.6¢/kWhr, and $3.9 billion/yr in operating costs @ 1.3¢/kWhr, or $5.7 billion/yr total. Upgrading the capacity of the existing fleet to achieve 300 billion kWhrs/yr will cost about $25 billion, extending the life-span of a dozen will cost about $6 billion, and building a dozen new ones to replace older ones will cost about $80 billion. So over the next two decades, the costs of keeping the nuclear fleet afloat is about $225 billion, much less than the fossil fuel alternative. This cost does not include insurance, financing or other non-operating or non-construction costs. Different assumptions can change the details but the difference will still be about five times. And restarting the nuclear fleet can be done now when the country needs it most. Japan must learn from the disaster and restart their remaining nuclear fleet by incorporating the changes in safety and corporate culture suggested by the international community, but it must restart them.

With respect to carbon and global warming, the choice facing Japan is even clearer. Bill McKibben’s recent article about climate change in Rolling Stone (Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math) paints a dire picture of the continuing increase in fossil fuel use occurring worldwide. As a geologist, I have to agree. But it is strange that nuclear, the energy source best suited to lower emissions, gets no discussion. As bad as the human health effects of Chernobyl were, the environmental effects of a thousand Chernobyl’s are nothing compared to a global temperature rise of just 2° C. We need stronger global regulatory control of nuclear, as well as all other power plants, but it will very, very bad to allow fossil fuels to be the dominant energy source in this century. Present unemployment rates won’t matter in that future.

The world has too much fossil fuel to let market forces decide our future. It will take committed leadership of the global community to implement a reasonable energy mix that meets the economic and environmental needs of the planet. The significant rise in carbon emissions from Japan and Germany, two nations previously committed to emission reductions, is ominous. Japan still has a choice, but Chancellor Merkel chose politics over science. Just the health care effects of increasing coal use in Germany will erase any perceived benefit of shutting down their nuclear reactors (How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt?).

The question is: what do you care about most? The planet’s survival, economic survival, or the fear of radiation? Japan has a choice to make.

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Yes, we know we are in a warming trend, but we have exacerbated it in many ways, not just with GHGs, but also, deforestation, agriculture, roads, desertification, etc, those things that change heat balance, surface properties, water budget and albedo. The effects of humans are difficult to quantify as we have had such a large effect for so long a time. Still, we need to do what we can, if only to adapt.

There is NO “normal cycle” of global warming relative to what we are seeing today. It isn’t just about a “fear of radiation” for Japan, they still have to pay to clean up Fukushima and they have no permanent waste disposal sites. Due to their geology it shouldn’t be unexpected that a similar catastrophe might occur in the next 40 years. They do have to make some tough choices.

Yes, I agree. While warming trends, even larger than this, occur throughout geologic history, the rate is what is different. Just like the absolute CO2 concentration is not as important as its rate of change. Humans have sped things up in many ways. Yes, Japan has to clean up from Fukushima, but this will not be anywhere near as bad as the effects of runaway warming. And if they learn from this, it won’t have to happen again. They did not learn from Three Mile Island, like we did, and they did not listen to calls for better tsunami walls, back-up generation, hydrogen venting and other measures that would have prevented a melt-down even under the Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami. That is why I am all for increased regulation and for severe penalties for industries and governments who willfully ignore warnings. Not sure who can enforce that. The U.N. through the IAEA?

I don’t strongly agree or disagree with you on the global warming aspects. But your economic points are absolutely correct–not bad for a scientist! No way (hopefully) will the Japanese give up 1/10 of their aggregate net worth to switch back to coal, or even more for other non-nuclear solutions.

Now, given your views on nuclear power, will Brown let you attend reunions?

Since I am generally a left-wing radical on most issues, they shouldn’t mind! But I do think the economics will decide the day. Just like for nuclear waste disposal – salt is cheaper than tuff. And, yes, I shudder every time I try to do economics!

Commercial use of nuclear power will bankrupt each and every country, it’s only a question of time!

Japan would be crazy to go back to commercial use of nuclear power!

And Japan would go bankrupt!

It’s already indebted with almost 250% of its annual GDP, higher than any other nation on earth!

Japan, like all other nations should respect the Geneva Call signed on October 2nd, 1978 by scientists, professors and politicians from the Swiss region of Geneva, where the CERN is located, and phase out from commercial use of nuclear power for ever!

So you advocate doubling their coal or gas generation? They can, and should, discuss long-term phase out or changes but they need power now. Even if you consider phasing out the fleet over time, you still need to restart them, with necessary safety upgrades mainly in operations and response, while you decide how to do that in the future. Otherwise, their economy will be irreparably harmed, as it is now. Their debt is increasing directly as a result of insufficient power, among other things resulting from the tsunami.

I enjoyed your article and its well thought out content. I want to raise one quibble and a different perspective.

The quibble is that Japan’s reliance on increasingly more expensive alternatives (many supplied from the US) will not benefit the US economy. It will benefit the coal sector, but overall the cost of goods from Japan will increase, making goods here in the states more expensive, causing an overall loss in welfare.

The new point is one that I think I’ve raised in the past, but am not sure, so please bear with me. One can theoretically measure the benefit of a good brought into the economy. This quantified benefit is the ratio of (1-cost of commodity/value of commodity in the market). We know the cost of the commodity, however determining the value has been difficult. Benjamin Ayers and Robert Warr in “The Economic Growth Engine: How energy and work drive material prosperity” propose a production function that includes the energy input into the economy, more specifically they use exergy. The marginal utility of exergy can in turn be broken down into separate commodities, oil, gas, coal, nuclear with econometric analysis done on each of these independent variables. It is then quite easy to compute the marginal utility (value) of a particular commodity to the entire economy as it is the partial derivative of the production function WRT to the specific commodity.

Marginal utility has the same functional relationship as pressure or chemical potential in thermodynamics. With this analogy the equation I described above represents the maximum theoretical efficiency of the reversible joule cycle.

Combine this with my quibble and the impact that the choice of Japan’s energy supply on our economy should be more apparent. BTW, Ayers and Warr developed a production function for Japan based off of their 1900-2000 historical data, and adapting the model would not be very difficult. Sorry about the technical detail, I wrote this for you, not other readers.

Good point, Cal! I didn’t think of the effect on goods shipped back to the U.S. but that is critical for an important U.S. trading partner.

Yes, this analysis would be excellent to apply to Japan (and the world at large). It gets to the underlying problem with value and the cost of energy as the simple costs do not contain these less obvious effects that we all try to evaluate and sometimes call externalities, but they really are direct effects, just far down the line from production and use. this would make a great paper, or even better, a great thesis!